I Had Fun! ... Didn't I?

Thanks to Jay for inviting me over to his house to play several different multiplayer video games with him, Colin, Jozef, Louis, Sam (at one point), Andrew (at one point), and some guy I don't know. I had a lot of fun, even if I had a nausea-inducing headache when I left.

Thing is, though, I was reminded of an important gamer lesson that I always, always forget! >_< And that lesson is, you need to find a game that is equal access to everyone. What do I mean by that? Well, I'll explain by telling you what happened, and you can figure it out for yourself.

The first game we played was Ghost Squad, a rail shooter by AM2 (Shenmue!!!) for the Wii. I was P1 and Jozef was P2. Neither of us had played before. Both modestly said the other would be better. And (points-wise) we ended up scoring neck-and-neck every mission. I had a lot of fun, and clearly so did Jozef. So ... we were on equal footing, and had a lot of fun.

The second game we played was Street Fighter 2. I love the game, and so does Jay's brother Sam ... err, Andrew. (Though I am told Sam is quite good at it, too.) Andrew kicked my ass, which I have to admit surprised me quite a bit, but I guess that's because I am a lot rustier at Street Fighter than I remember. Still! I had loads of fun. I love Street Fighter, and he rarely went easy on me in the same fight as he went hard on me. Which was good, because I knew (when he fought seriously) that I was really fighting him, and that was fun. And when he went easy, he stayed easy, even when he was about to die (and did die), and I didn't mind it so much because we were all laughing at how bad I am at the game. So again, even if my skill level was below Andrew's, we were still on equal footing experience-wise. You could argue this and say he's got more experience or I do or blah blah blah, but my point is, neither of us was a beginner with the other being a pro.

Well, from there things went downhill. Unfortunately. :( We next played SSBM, but Colin was way out of his league (even though it was 3 beginners and only 1 expert playing), and he had a miserable time. So we quit pretty early.

Then Jay and I played Shonen Jump SuperStars for 10 minutes. We soon learned that Jay's family hadn't created any custom decks using the comics they'd unlocked. Because the game's all in Japanese and so they just kept using the game's preconstructed decks. And that's not all: Jay hadn't even played the game all that much, whereas I played it (literally) all June in England, so ... about 3 weeks of probably 2+ hours daily. It was an unfair match-up, and (much to my dismay, but also much to my understanding) Jay was not having a fun time and we packed it up after only two rounds.

Finally, we played Ghost Squad again, but this time the scenario was different. Instead of two beginners figuring out the fun together, we had one expert (Jay) who knew exactly when certain bad guys were due to appear onscreen (or so it seemed :p), and as such his was always the first shot and his score raced ahead of ours. Then it was Colin and me, who were each intermediates (well, I'd only just played once, but I also had figured out the basics by then and had played every stage once). But the guy whose name I don't know, he was completely new. So we had all three flavors: Expert, Intermediate x2, and Beginner. And it wasn't pretty. :\ Like I already mentioned, Jay's score was way ahead of all of ours. Now, even though the Beginner's score was 2nd place, he still got yelled at a lot by all of us (mostly me, I imagine ¬¬) because we were all yelling at him not to do things like shoot hostages, shoot bombs, etc. And he even got blamed by somebody else for failing one mission (I forget which it was or who said what to him), and he seemed genuinely bummed out and I felt really bad for the guy.

This was around the time I went home. Not because I wasn't having fun (don't let this blog update fool you! I said that Colin, Jay, and NoName were the ones disappointed with Games 3, 4, and 5. I had a blast all night!), but because I had a massive nauseating headache. I believe the latent cause was blocked sinuses (I've been blowing bloody snot ever since I came home), but I think the trigger cause was Jay's really loud speaker setup. So it's probably for the best that I left, since ever since I came home I've felt better and the speakers might have gotten me to the puking point if I'd stayed any longer.

Anyway. Sorry to drag your hosted event into the spotlight like this for my other readers, Jay! I just thought it served as a good reminder for what to do (the Ryan and Jozef scenario) and what not to do (the Colin w/ Smash Bros, Jay w/ SJS, etc.) when having a gaming bash. Because I always, always fuck up and force people to play DOA, Pokemon, etc. with me and it's clear that there's no contest. (I have a good friend from Purdue who used to get really agitated with me about this problem.)